i have serious doubts and want to find what others think, i really need to convince my dad, what are the problems involved and who would you go with

edit: ok for get Be cos they dont serve this area but which isp do you think is best in the uk bearing in mind i do online schooling from home and need a very reliable connection that is totally unlimited cos it is literally solid streamed audio all day

I voted stay away, as that's what I would do. But in your situation it may be the easiest solution as it should work from the box and have decent tech support.

I prefer to have a router of my choice, and a pretty much no-frills ADSL connection...no call deals, no niche-y piece of new hardware, but with good reports of reliability and speed and although it is not an unlimited service, the allowances are very reasonable as long as I leech at the right times.

you see my dad is a network engineir and i know what im doing with pc and networks so out the box is actually a prob in some ways cos it means to set it just perfect will be harder

BT are a stable ISP, they have limits (40 GB), but i'm willing to bet i've broken that many many times and they've said naff all.

The BT Phone might be worth disabling though, as it has QOS bandwidth shapping-thingy running.

BT do have a nasty habit of throttling my FTP downloads at "peak times" though, and as any UKCT'er will know thats a VERY bad thing.

Quote from Jakg :

BT do have a nasty habit of throttling my FTP downloads at "peak times" though, and as any UKCT'er will know thats a VERY bad thing.

Trying to get around shaping by leeching to a webserver then FTP downloading are we ?

well jack atm there option 3 is unlimited, i think bt reallyis our only option

You sure it's unlimited? AFAIK were on the £26 a month package which i thought was the top one and limited to 40 GB a month...

@ Bean0 - Not quite, lets just say i like downloading from FTP servers :P

BT's tech support is rubbish though, twice i've tried contacting them, first because they were caching my website to the point at which i couldn't even see if it was working when i uploaded new pages, to which they recommended i used GeoCities (LOL), and the second was when i asked about their FTP throttling, and they were just as "helpful".

I thought you had a Virgin Media cable connection? I have the 20mb "XL" package, and my connection is always stable.

People have bitched and moaned about this ISP, however from my PERSONAL point of view its a great ISP. Yes there is 1 big down side with the traffic shaping policy, however connectivity wise its fantastic. I have never had any issues with my connection in the 3 years ive been with them. Ive never had to ring them up because of service issues. Well... i say i havent rang them up, i did once... only when requesting the upgrade though .

yeah but we have the mid package and whe your streaming audio all day the 750mb limit untill your speed is halfed is used very quickly and when i say reliablei mean when your education relys on it it is more than vitale, and vm are so unreliable and they never try and invistigate, youve been lucky, and the traffic sharing is a hell of a problem when u rely on it as i do

Given the choice I would never ever ever use BT again. I've had the pleasure of sitting on the phone to them for over 6 hours to set up a phone line, which I purely use for internet. n1 BT. Stay away.

Just cos they got that guy from My Family in their ads, doesnt make them good

The advice here alone would be enough for me to look elsewhere.

ok we have done a deal with vm and got the xl pack which is 20meg and on this one is halved after 3gig but only goes to 10meg so is still quicker, that is the reason dan never nocided it, also the number for some reason couldnt be ported to bt and my dads email would go if we left vm so were staying for now, and finaly there costomer support people listened

Actually, it goes down to 5mb down and 256kb up when you hit 3GB between 4 and 12, not the 10mb down that you thought...

Source: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

Quote from Virgin Media :

Broadband Size: XL
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: XL package download at least 3GB of traffic each.

Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 5Mb, with their upload speed set to 256Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

Even if a Broadband Size: XL user has their speed temporarily traffic managed, they can still download over 4,000 music files per day.

we were told that that is from when xl was 10meg now its 20meg its 10meg when restricted

No it isn't. And I'm speaking from first-hand experience.

well we did a test last night when it was capped(on purpose) and it seemed like 10

If it's stability with no limits you are after, then I recommend looking at some of the 'business' packages.
I am signed up to Eclipse business..they are shite with their 'home' deals, (limits. throttling etc) but in terms of price/performance/features their business deals are top banana.

well tbo eclipse would mean having to spen 120-150, yes thats right, on just having a bt line put in so were gonna stay woth vm atm and see what happens

I'd strongly recommend sticking away from BT based on my experiences (my latest problem is here). I've had countless reliability problems, some of which may (and I very much doubt) be down to the line quality rather than their servers but the customer service is so useless that you never get anywhere, each time you phone them up you wait 20minutes then they don't appear to have kept any record of your previous phone calls to them and they always give some kind of pathetic get out answer or say they'll call back (they never do). Of course these problems have an irritating habbit of suddenly stopping the minute you actually get through to customer support.

Generally my connection is quick at off peak times, when everybody else wants to use the internet I tend to drop off completely at least once every few minutes (I haven't been able to play any online games or download any files at peak times for about 2 weeks).

...and this is my third try to post this post...

BT have been great with me, good when I was on dial up and even better now I'm on broadband, I haven't had any problems...touch wood.

I think every ISP you can think of has thier horror stories.....

Quote from garph :

I think every ISP you can think of has thier horror stories.....

Well in fairness to BT we have had countless issues with our phone lines over the years due to how weirdly they're laid out in our house and originally chose BT for dial up based on the (misguided) notion that they'd be better able to help if things didn't work. I honestly have no idea whether our issues are ISP related or phone line related but BTs customer service has been so useless I can't help but feel that another ISP couldn't have done better without pissing us off as much.

If you have a conventional phone line then BT may well be a good value package but do not go for them under an illusion that they'll be able to better sort out phone line/exchange issues or if you ever expect to have a need to call customer service.